The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 6

none of the smallest. She would have been
easily to be figured for us at this occupation; dipping, at off moments
and quiet hours, in snatched visits and by draughty candle-light, into
her rich collections and seeing her jewels again a little shyly, but all
unmistakably, glow. That in fact may pass as the very picture of her
semi-smothered agitation, of the diversion she to some extent
successfully found in referring her crisis, so far as was possible, to the
mere working of her own needs.
It must be added, however, that she would have been at a loss to
determine--and certainly at first--to which order, that of self-control or
that of large expression, the step she had taken the afternoon of her
husband's return from Matcham with his companion properly belonged.
For it had been a step, distinctly, on Maggie's part, her deciding to do
something, just then and there, which would strike Amerigo as unusual,
and this even though her departure from custom had merely consisted
in her so arranging that he wouldn't find her, as he would definitely
expect to do, in Eaton Square. He would have, strangely enough, as
might seem to him, to come back home for it, and there get the
impression of her rather pointedly, or at least all impatiently and
independently, awaiting him. These were small variations and mild
manoeuvres, but they went accompanied on Maggie's part, as we have
mentioned, with an infinite sense of intention. Her watching by his
fireside for her husband's return from an absence might superficially
have presented itself as the most natural act in the world, and the only
one, into the bargain, on which he would positively have reckoned. It

fell by this circumstance into the order of plain matters, and yet the
very aspect by which it was, in the event, handed over to her brooding
fancy was the fact that she had done with it all she had designed. She
had put her thought to the proof, and the proof had shown its edge; this
was what was before her, that she was no longer playing with blunt and
idle tools, with weapons that didn't cut. There passed across her vision
ten times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she
most shut her eyes, most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion
and sound. She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, to Portland
Place, instead of remaining in Eaton Square, and she privately repeated
it again and again-- there had appeared beforehand no reason why she
should have seen the mantle of history flung, by a single sharp sweep,
over so commonplace a deed. That, all the same, was what had
happened; it had been bitten into her mind, all in an hour, that nothing
she had ever done would hereafter, in some way yet to be determined,
so count for her--perhaps not even what she had done in accepting, in
their old golden Rome, Amerigo's proposal of marriage. And yet, by
her little crouching posture there, that of a timid tigress, she had meant
nothing recklessly ultimate, nothing clumsily fundamental; so that she
called it names, the invidious, the grotesque attitude, holding it up to
her own ridicule, reducing so far as she could the portee of what had
followed it. She had but wanted to get nearer--nearer to something
indeed that she couldn't, that she wouldn't, even to herself, describe;
and the degree of this achieved nearness was what had been in advance
incalculable. Her actual multiplication of distractions and suppressions,
whatever it did for her, failed to prevent her living over again any
chosen minute--for she could choose them, she could fix them--of the
freshness of relation produced by her having administered to her
husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated him. It had been
a poor thing, but it had been all her own, and the whole passage was
backwardly there, a great picture hung on the wall of her daily life, for
her to make what she would of.
It fell, for retrospect, into a succession of moments that were
WATCHABLE still; almost in the manner of the different things done
during a scene on the stage, some scene so acted as to have left a great
impression on the tenant of one of the stalls. Several of these moments
stood out beyond the others, and those she could feel again most, count

again like the firm pearls on a string, had belonged more particularly to
the lapse of time before dinner--dinner which had been so late, quite at
nine o'clock, that evening, thanks to the final lateness of Amerigo's own
advent. These were parts of the experience--though in fact there had
been a good many of